Panther Baby by Jamal Joseph

“You better treat this young sister right now,” Captain Lumumba Shakur demanded, “or there’s going to be a psychosomatic riot right here in the emergency room.” Th e ER doctors located a hematologist and gave the little girl morphine for her pain and proper treatment for her sickle-cell. I stood at attention in line with the other Panthers, but inside I was bursting with excitement and pride. I had never seen or been a part of anything like this. Young black people, liberation soldiers, taking on doctors and the hospital system—and winning. I felt like I was part of a team of superheroes, like I might even been able to step outside and fly.
    One day I was with Afeni and other Panthers in a broken-down building whose tenants we were helping to organize. I saw a little boy with a bandage covering an ugly rat bite. We noticed a baby sleeping in a crib with panties tied around his head. “Why do you have panties around the baby’s head?” Afeni asked the young mother.
    “So the roaches won’t crawl into her nose or her ears while she sleeps,” the young mother replied tearfully. “I scrub my house every day. I use the insect spray every night, and they still come back.”
    By the end of the week we helped the tenants seize control of the building and had community lawyers teach them how to set up an escrow account so they could use their rent money to bring in an exterminator and make repairs to the building.
    It felt like there was never a dull moment with the Black Panther Party. I was always in the midst of excitement, potential danger, and the coolest black men and women on the planet. What fifteen-year-old wouldn’t want to feel as fully engaged and as turned on about life, black culture, and the “people’s revolution” as I was?
    Th e New York chapter was divided into sections according to where you lived. Th e Bronx section did not have an office. We went to our main meetings at the Harlem office but had section meetings at Yedwa’s house. Th ere were about fifteen of us in a section. I would find reasons to hang around and be one of the last ones to leave the meeting. I was fascinated by Yedwa’s swagger and style. He spent time in Vietnam before joining the movement. He worked along with Lumumba Shakur as an organizer for a group called the Elsmere Tenants Council. Th ey would help tenants get repairs, heat, fight evictions, and so forth.
    Yedwa was always shoving cops, arguing with officials, and talking about battling the pigs. Most of the young Panthers wanted to be like him. I felt really cool and important when Yedwa would let me hang around with him selling Panther papers; standing security at a rally; or cooling out in his apartment listening to jazz, eating fried chicken and apple pie, and talking about life from a “revolutionary black man’s point of view.”
    His pad had a couch with no legs and a couple of pillows that Yedwa called the “low-to-the-ground feel.” He would push back his couch to teach me fighting moves or take me to the park and show me hand-to-hand combat techniques. He took me to the woods and taught me how to shoot a pistol and a rifle so I could be “ready when the time comes.” Most important, for a fifteen-year-old man-child with raging hormones, he instructed me on the right way to rap to a Panther woman, something he had touched on earlier when he overheard me trying to talk to a pretty young sister. Yedwa completed the lesson with a smile and a wink. “If you say all the right things, then a sister might tell you, ‘Well, come by my house and rest while I make a little dinner, brother.’ See Panther women like brothers who work hard for the struggle. Th at’s how you get their attention.”
    I first got Yedwa’s attention when the Panthers got into a scuffle with cops at a courthouse in Brooklyn. We came out to support a Panther who was arrested on gun charges. Th irty cops started pushing and shoving us in the hallway near the elevator. We started